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- Issue #608
Issue #608
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 18th April’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked finds the context you need from your team’s code, discussions, docs, issue trackers and more.
Now everyone gets expert-level answers, without having to interrupt a teammate.
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “Having the right words can be the difference between doubting whether to speak up at all, or voicing your point of view confidently. With that, here are 7 phrases I often use when sharing feedback that makes it easier for me to speak openly and quickly, and encourages my recipient to take action.“
Leadership Management
— Subbu Allamaraju
tl;dr: “Most leadership learning is experiential. We observe, learn, and emulate from others, often subconsciously. Yet, the core of such learning starts shallow, leading to behavioral and decision-making mistakes, learned and uncorrected bad behaviors, and dysfunction. Some get better with experience and scope, but more often than not, we wing it, frequently repeating the same behaviors and mistakes for years.” Recognizing this, Subbu enrolled in the Psychology of Leadership at Penn State University. He shares the top twenty from those studies.
Leadership Management
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: Docs get written, but answers stay hard to find. The problem isn’t the docs themselves. It’s that the context developers need is scattered, outdated, or missing entirely. Why does this keep happening? And what’s the alternative?
Promoted by Unblocked
Management Documentation
— Gergely Orosz
tl;dr: “It is easy to assume that hiring solid engineers has never been simpler because fewer businesses are posting jobs and more engineers are competing for roles. But I’ve been talking with engineering managers, directors, and heads of engineering at startups and mid-sized companies, and got a surprise: they say the opposite is true! In fact, many report that in 2025 they find it harder to hire than ever.”
Hiring
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: “The idea of snapshot testing is simple. First, you convert the outcome of a test to a textual representation. Then, you compare it with expected value, specified as an inline string literal, using textual diff. Finally, there’s a tool that will automatically update the literal in the source code to match the value actually observed.”
Tests
tl;dr: BlueOptima’s meta-analysis—drawing on 12 major cybersecurity reports and supporting research—reveals how vulnerabilities in secret management, third‑party libraries, and insecure coding practices drive nearly half of global breaches, costing millions per incident. Read the full report to learn actionable strategies to safeguard your digital assets.
Promoted by BlueOptima
Security
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “I haven’t been particularly impressed by most online content about LLMs and security. For instance, the draft OWASP content is accurate but not particularly useful. It portrays LLM security as being a wide array of different threats that you have to familiarize yourself with. Instead, I think LLM security is better thought of as flowing from a single principle. Here it is: LLMs sometimes act maliciously, so you must treat LLM output like user input.”
LLM CareerAdvice
tl;dr: DoorDash developed a Geo-Grid-Cache system that divides areas into hexagonal cells with precomputed travel estimates, achieving fast routing times while maintaining accuracy. This innovation reduces latency below 100ms and eliminates costly real-time calculations by using a tiered approach with three resolution levels.
SystemDesign Algo
tl;dr: “In the world of DevOps and Developer Experience, speed and efficiency can make a big difference on an engineer’s day-to-day tasks. Today, we’ll dive into how Slack’s DevXP team took some existing tools and used them to optimize an end-to-end testing pipeline. This lowered build times and reduced redundant processes, saving both time and resources for engineers at Slack.”
Tests
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
12 Factor Agents: Principles for building reliable LLM apps.
Codex: Lightweight coding agent that runs in terminal.
Gh-signoff: GitHub CLI extension for local CI.
Liam ERD: Automatically generates ER diagrams from your DB.
Meetily: AI-powered meeting assistant.
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